Just a quick post to say our short film “Uncle Griot” has finally been finished. Here’s our first stab at a poster for it:

It’s been a slow and sometimes tortuous process as we choose a particularly difficult combination of elements to animate. Basically everything moved; the grass moved because of the storm, Stina’s hair flicked, the cloth moved, the faces moved; one of the stars of the short is totally covered in dense hair that had to react to his body and the wind, the trees rustled, the leaves flew around and the clouds moved. This sort of stuff is all par-for-the-course in feature production, where you have multiple departments all tied together with a coherent pipeline supported by tools programmers. But when you can count the number of VFX artists working on it on one hand, it can become tricky getting it all done efficiently and in a decent amount of time. The effort was all worth it in the end though and we’re very excited about the final result. It offers a brief but rich slice of life in Stina’s universe. We spent the whole summer rendering the assorted passes and composited them as we went, finishing the final edit a few days ago. The plan now is to have a screening for the cast and crew, then fire it off to the international short film circuit. This is a fairly daunting prospect, as it’s a new and complex world of “dos & dont’s” that i’m not familiar with, and can apparently get very expensive if you don’t navigate it with caution. I intend to get advice on this. Also the short is book-ended with some music that we needed to get clearance for, which will require a certain amount of funds we are yet to secure (more news on this soon hopefully) I’ll be making some behind the scenes videos about some of the assorted and complex processes we used to make the short. Look out for these over the next few months. Its been very hard work with a lot of late nights, but it’s been worth it 🙂